Whatever Happened to Cricket?

This has been the sort of week that makes you realise just how much cricket has changed in recent years, and to wonder what the long term consequences might be.

Australia is in England to play just a series of one day matches, nothing else. An England tour always used to be an Ashes tour, but not anymore and at least some locals are concerned that this is leading to a decline in standards generally as cricket apparently searches for new audiences. In an epic rant, one MCC member railed against “the great unwashed” who had been admitted to the members’ pavilion at Lords for a county one dayer. He hinted darkly that he expected more of the same if the similarly unwashed were admitted during Australian games. (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2165561/Kick-Great-Unwashed-MCC-members-plea-hallowed-Lords-Pavilion-invaded-Twenty20-cricket-fans.html ). Where might that possibly end?

Meanwhile Chris Gayle, still in search of a return to the West Indies test side despite a long stand-off with the West Indies Cricket Board, smashed New Zealand in a T20 match – staged in Lauderhill, South Florida, USA. Yes, Florida. (http://www.espncricinfo.com/magazine/content/story/570537.html ). The location of the match upset many Caribbean observers, believing it a desertion of local venues. Supporters of the move point out that many of those local venues have been eerily empty of late for many internationals, so at least Lauderhill is drumming up business elsewhere. Most of the spectators were expats from the Caribbean, and one of the organisers was the legendary West Indies off spinner Lance Gibbs.

The USA and more recently China have been on the minds of the International Cricket Council as possible sources of new support and, of course, revenue. The game’s culture has never made it easy to transport elsewhere, even if the old time representatives of Empire did their valiant best all those years ago. A conceptually simple game like football run under relatively straightforward rules is much easier to sell, to the point where Manchester United has more fans than in China than at home.

The ICC, meanwhile, had more pressing issues on hand at its annual meeting – held in the cricket powerhouse city of Kuala Lumpur. In part this is good for the promotion of cricket. However, it needs to be pointed out that for the past several years it has been impossible to hold full meetings in mainstream cricket capitals. That is because Zimbabwe is still a recognised member and its representative on the Board is Peter Chingoka, who has been banned from entering the United Kingdom, Australia and elsewhere as a result of fallout from both the Mugabe regime and his own connections in some alleged indiscretions with cricket finances.

On a cheerier note the ICC did ratify the Woolf Report suggestions about turning the President’s position into a more nominal role and turning over real power to an independent Chair. (http://www.thatscricket.com/news/2012/06/28/here-are-results-of-icc-board-meeting-063593.html ). Outgoing President Sharad Pawar, always controversial, will be succeeded by Kiwi Alan Isaac who is there because of the heated struggle that saw former Australian Prime Minister John Howard thwarted in his ambitions to become cricket’s supremo.

At the playing level, however, the ongoing stoush over the use and non-use of the Decision Review System (DRS) remained unresolved with India being told it would not have such use forced upon its team. Cricket is a game in which the umpiring plays a hugely influential role, and its rules are so complex that the use of emergent technology seems almost a given. India, however, has held out, and such is its economic power that its view has prevailed.

Back home in India this week, however, the news was even grimmer. The IPL season has come and gone, almost unnoticed outside the country itself, but one result of the series has renewed focus on the game’s vulnerability. The BCC has announced that five Indian players have been banned for involvement in or possible association with match fixing during the IPL series. T.P. Suchindra has been banned for life, others for five years and below, but the image for both IPL and cricket more generally is seriously poor. (http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/sports/01-Jul-2012/five-indians-banned-for-match-fixing )

The real problem for cricket is that this fixing story is now over a decade old and will not go away even though the ICC and other national organisations have established integrity commissioners and anti-corruption units. Former Pakistani leg spinner Danesh Kanaria has been given a lifetime ban by the ICC for his connection to fixing, and just recently an England county player was also
convicted. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/counties/9349842/Danish-Kaneria-lifetime-ban-the-key-players-in-spot-fixing-plot-that-started-in-Essex-nightclub.html ). The return of the problem to India itself is a clear reminder of where most of the bookies come from. In the original incident back in the 90s South African captain Hansie Cronje was banned, and former Indian captain Mohammed Azharuddin was banned for life for his connection for linking Cronje to the Indian bookies. Azharuddin is now an Indian MP, and the BCCI forgave him a few years ago while the ICC maintains the life ban.

Comments

Very interesting and thought provoking, as ever, but is this problem not a part of a wider decline in public morality? Most recently we have had Bob Diamond and Barclay’s Bank fixing, of all things, the rates of interest which have an impact on almost everything in world finance, MPs in ‘the mother of parliaments’ (I can only imagine she was unmarried) fiddling their expenses, a P M who lied to parliament and to his own cabinet on the small matter of going to war, police who will quite correctly, spend millions of man hours chasing teenage rioters and their hangers on but who find 650 MPs ‘too many’ to investigate, Murdoch and his lickspittles prepared to hack into ‘phones to sell more stories and make even more money. If my children now ask me ‘who can you trust?’ the answer i shall be giving is ‘no one’. And it all seems to be associated with money, or power, or both.Lost our moral compass? Lost our moral satnav if you ask me.

Thanks a lot for that David and you are right, this all happens in the wider context. The fixers, for example, were “sentenced” by the BCCI President who has a massive conflict of interest in that he also owns the Chennai IPL side; Arun Jaitley who has a day job as a BJP leader opposing Manmohan Singh; and Niranjan Shah who as Secretary to BCCI was close to the now disgraced Lalit Modi. Thin line between right/wrong etc? And the ICC is incapable of providing settings for the satnav. The young English player caught in the Kaneria case was on GBP 7, 000 a year watching others make millions. That all has to be handled